GAMER is a high-concept action thriller set in a near future when gaming and entertainment have evolved into a terrifying new hybrid. Humans control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online games: people play people…for keeps. Mind-control technology is widespread, and at the heart of the controversial games is its creator, reclusive billionaire Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). His latest brainchild, the first-person shooter game “Slayers,” allows millions to act out their most savage fantasies online in front of a global audience, using real prisoners as avatars with whom they fight to the death.

Kable (300’s Gerard Butler) is the superstar and cult hero of the ultraviolent “Slayers.” Kable is controlled by Simon, a young gamer with rock star status who continues to defy all odds by guiding Kable to victory each week. Taken from his family, imprisoned and forced to fight against his will, the modern day gladiator must survive long enough to escape the game to free his family, regain his identity and to save mankind from Castle’s ruthless technology.

What if you weren’t in control of your own actions? What could you be forced to do against your will? Have sex with a complete stranger? Kill the people you love? In GAMER, a techno-themed action-thriller set in the not-too-distant future, co-creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (CRANK) have taken simulated reality into a terrifying new dimension.

Following the success of the CRANK films, which Neveldine and Taylor describe as “pure ADD candy,” the duo wanted to tackle a deeper story featuring bigger ideas and more complex characters. The filmmakers create three unique worlds within GAMER, each with its own filmic style and design. “The simulated reality game, ‘Slayers,’ is a massive, multiplayer battlefield; ‘Society’ is a tripped-out, fetishistic social-networking community; and then the real world exists outside the games,” explains Neveldine. “Each one has its own look and feeling, its own set of visual rules – from color to camera movement to effects to set design.”

“GAMER has all the hallmarks of Neveldine’s and Taylor’s sick, yet genius minds,” says actor Gerard Butler, who stars as Kable, a gladiator who fights to regain his identity within the gaming system that holds him captive. “They really have an innate, natural ability to create these kinds of concepts without over-thinking them, while creating great characters and keeping this element of freshness, youth and progressive thinking. They’re very talented.”

Like most successful science fiction, GAMER’s speculations about the future have a firm basis in present day reality. According to producer Tom Rosenberg, that’s part of its appeal. He says, “Although the story is far out, it’s grounded in reality. In fact, everything in the game, although set in the future, is really taking place right now, just to a lesser degree.”

Producer Gary Lucchesi agrees. “I think all the best science fiction is an extension of what you’re currently seeing. You speculate on what’s happening now and exaggerate it. I remember listening to the radio one day coming to work,” he recalls. “There was a young woman playing an online game who changed her avatar, her online alterimage, into this 6’6″ tough guy who carried a gun or a knife, and terrified people. Her alter ego was able to express itself through that video world. I think those fantasies certainly live within all of us.”

After watching his physical, emotionally rich performance in Zach Snyder’s 300, Neveldine and Taylor knew Gerard Butler was the only actor to play Kable. “There are so few true action stars left on this planet, and Gerard is the best,” says Taylor. “He has incredible physical presence and is willing to do the homework to make the action look real and visceral, as we saw with 300. But at the same time, there is a soul and humanity to his performances that draws you in and involves you emotionally.”

Apart from the originality of the story, Butler was also attracted to the cutting-edge approach of the filmmakers’ style. “I like to take risks,” he says, “and I want to think that any project I do is going to affect people either because it’s a new way of filmmaking, or because of the emotion behind it, or how unusual the story is. GAMER satisfied all of those requirements.”

For the part of Angie Tillman, Kable’s wife who is ensnared in the fetishistic ‘Society’ game, model and actress Amber Valletta faced considerable physical and emotional challenges. “When I first read the script, I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this,'” Valletta says. “The genre yes, but not this kind of material. Nothing has ever been made that sounded, looked or felt like it. I’d never seen a woman in a role like this. It felt very modern.”

“Angie is a tough role,” Neveldine admits. “There’s the pain Amber has to go through being controlled, the sexual things the script put her through and the emotions and grief and all that stuff. But she tackled it so well. She surprised us everyday. She was amazing.”
Taylor adds, “I don’t think we really knew how good Amber was until she started working. It was pretty awesome, and she’s just a sweetheart.”

Playing living avatars controlled by other people, Butler and Valletta grappled with the challenge of not being allowed to react intuitively to a given situation, a dynamic that is in direct conflict with naturalistic acting. Valletta had to practice being utterly powerless in some of the film’s most difficult scenes, while Butler had to modify every aspect of his physical work. “Basically, the directors wanted the warriors in the ‘Slayers’ game to move differently, like a character would in a video game,” explains stunt coordinator Darin Prescott. “So guys will march ahead, kind of turn their guns, and then they’ll turn with it. It’s not as fluid as if guys were just running through battle. There’s also a little delay, or “ping,” as it’s called in the story, which happens when the controlling character makes a move and then the controlled character will make the same move a fraction of a second later.”
The unlikely controller of global action star Kable is Simon, a rich, sequestered teenage boy played by Logan Lerman. For most of the story, Simon is able to control the brutality of the game from the comforts of his high-tech gaming room, which Lerman describes as “working with little orange dots everywhere, which is a little complicated, but you get used to it. You get the flow of things and you adapt to the different style. It’s cool.”

In one particular scene, Simon actually appears on the battlefield with Kable, which was an intimidating experience for Lerman. “It was just so overwhelming,” Lerman says, laughing. “I give a lot of credit to Gerard to be able to focus with explosions going off and people getting shot right in front of him. It’s crazy stuff. I felt more at home in the studio.”

The real mastermind of GAMER’s virtual worlds, however, is Ken Castle, played by Michael C. Hall, the star of Showtime’s hit series, “Dexter.” “Michael was the ideal actor to play Castle,” Taylor avows. “This is one of those performances that people are going to talk about.”

A man who has grown up in the world of video games and the internet, Castle is the creator of the gaming technology in the film’s story. Sequestered in his house, Castle has no need for the outside world, having created a virtual environment of which he is the sole master. Taylor describes Castle as merely one part of a greater dystopian future landscape. “Castle’s basically trying to control everything,” he explains. “He’s trying to get his hands on everything and make everybody march in step and do exactly what he wants them to do. We’re moving toward a world, I think, where all of us can be Castle.”

For Hall, Castle’s egomania was the most appealing aspect of the part. “Castle believes he’s enlightened in a way that no one else is, that he’s super-human. He doesn’t see himself as evil. He’s like a kid playing in a sandbox.” The role also gave Hall the opportunity to break away from the somewhat repressed characters he’s played on television. “The part was like getting on a funhouse ride. I got to be unashamed, lascivious, do a Sammy Davis Jr. soft shoe, beat up the action hero of the year while controlling him with my mind, and have a really strange and severe hairstyle all in the same movie.”

Despite GAMER’s dark, cautionary story, Neveldine’s and Taylor’s vision of the future is not completely without hope. A rebel group called the “Humanz” recognizes that Kable has become more popular among the fans of the game than the game itself, and if they can get his support, they stand a chance of tearing down the rapidly growing threat to humanity. At the head of this organization is a man called “Humanz Brother,” played by Chris “Ludacris” Bridges.

“I took on the role because I play the voice of reason in the story,” explains Bridges, who is an avid gamer himself. “It seems like video games get more and more interactive, and it’s just crazy to sit here and think how games will evolve over the next decade. If you allow evolution like this to continue where you’re toying around with human beings, it can become something very dangerous. But I think this movie is all about how much influence each individual has on the future and how we can make things change for the good and not for the bad.”

Rounding out the cast of GAMER is Kyra Sedgwick in the role of media star Gina Parker Smith, a celebrity who is instrumental to the Humanz’s mission to overthrow Castle. A fan of CRANK, Sedgwick signed on to the project having limited exposure to the world of gaming. “It was a leap of faith in that way,” she says, “but I really liked their first film and I liked this character. I thought she was fun. I liked the fact that she changes in the film. At first, she’s just completely out for herself, out to get the story. She doesn’t care who she hurts along the way. But ultimately she realizes that she does have to make a decision between whether to fight this underground grassroots Humanz fight or to be on the side of Ken Castle.”

Neveldine’s and Taylor’s partnership extends to every aspect of the filmmaking process. Two halves of a single creative force, they share directing responsibilities equally and are most often seen together on set rapid-firing ideas at a breakneck speed. The pace of their work can be destabilizing for the crew and actors; yet it consistently yields results. “Mark and Brian are very unique, very smart, very talented, and they’re completely dead-straight honest,” says Rosenberg. “There’s no manipulation. If they say they can do something, they always do it.”

Neveldine’s and Taylor’s love of cutting edge technology, featured prominently in the film’s story, also extends to the filmmaking itself. To further define the unique look of each of the film’s fictional environments, the directors chose to use a revolutionary new camera system developed by RED. The RED camera is a digital system that incorporates compact flash cards instead of digital tape. While the system had not been tested to withstand the extreme rigors of an action film production, Neveldine and Taylor, who also serve as camera operators, were willing to take the risk. “Every movie we’ve shot, we’ve shot on a different format,” Taylor explains. “We’re always trying to find the latest, most technological thing like these RED cameras. We were almost beta testing these cameras in the field.”

“We’ve always wanted to move from the film world into new technology,” Neveldine adds. “We’ve been HD guys from the beginning. We love to push those cameras to the limit; we love what they can do. RED isn’t HD though. It’s RED. It’s a whole different format; it’s its own beast. It’s beautiful. It’s the most silky image you’ll ever see. When we tried it and saw how compact the camera was and how cool it was, there was no other option but RED.”

As camera operators, Neveldine and Taylor regularly incorporate unorthodox camera techniques to achieve a desired effect. Neveldine, who was on rollerblades from the time he could walk, will commonly pick up a camera and take off in a tracking shot, which is one of the real advantages of the smaller RED camera.

“The picture looks awesome,” says Butler. “It’s never really been done before, and you just have to see two seconds of this film, and you go, ‘Wow. What is this? This is really cool.’ It’s beautiful.”
The directors and production designer Jerry Fleming took a similarly innovative approach when designing GAMER’s futuristic world. Rather than build entire sets on a soundstage, the filmmakers made it their mission to find real, working locations and transform them into strange new environments. “We wanted our future to look practical, lived in, grounded, not something dreamed up on an art table,” explains Taylor. “So we took real places and repurposed them, such as turning a functioning gypsum mine into a prison. What you get is a location that looks like something people would actually exist in. Jerry is a genius at that.”

Fleming had to create twenty major sets with some sixty essential set lines. “There’s no such thing as knowing what they’re going to shoot,” Fleming says. “You have to dress everything pretty much 360?, which my very first director that I ever worked with, Robert Altman, taught me. I didn’t have that opportunity again until Mark and Brian. With these guys, I dress sets as much as I can so that they can do whatever they want to do. You just have to assume that it’s going to be on camera, and that’s much more exciting than building two-wall sets.”

For Butler, the varied, creative use of locations made production an endlessly exciting process. “Unlike 300, where we used green screen technology, here we were actually in many different environments,” explains the actor. “You’re in the big train station or you’re in the prison or you’re up there in the gypsum mine at an altitude of 7,000 feet. You’re in these incredible locations that really help you buy into the feel of being in this messed-up future. But it still feels very organic. It’s just like today’s world, but 20 years away.”

Whether it’s the story, the filmmaking technology or the production design, Neveldine and Taylor are committed to discovering new, unique ways to develop and execute their projects, with the hope of helping to expand the possibilities of the medium itself. Rather than choosing between high-tech innovations or guerilla-style pragmatism, the directors embrace both in equal measure, resulting in filmmaking that’s continually surprising and teeming with vitality. “We’re not trying to take something familiar and push it to the next level by spending more money, piling on more and more effects, and marketing it down your throat,” says Neveldine. “We want to give audiences something totally new and original, something they haven’t seen before.”

This film is in post production. It was filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico from November 2007 – February 2008. The title of the film is a “working title” and may be retitled for release.

Interesting Trivia: Mark Neveldine played a cameraman in Ariel Vromen’s short film, Jewel of the Sahara, in which Gerard had the starring role.

I am a huge Gerry fan…..and anxiously awaited the dvd sale of Gamer. Gerry Butler is amazing….a complete package actor. The depth of emotion in his face tells so much without a word and the action scenes were amazing!

The negative points on this movie….sexual content. I know, I know it is rated R but I don’t think that enough was warned about the sexual content in this movie. Guess I am a prude….but the video game concept definitely lead me to thinking my teenage sons could handle the “violence” but I was not expecting the “girls gone wild” scenes.

Still love Gerrys work and will always “snatch-up” his new movies as they come out!!

I completely agree with Claudia, who made a post on September 7. Where has publicity been? I feel like Gerry is one of the best and most versatile actors out there. He has the combination of all the elements that make an actor a star. There’s no role that Pitt or Clooney can play that Gerard Butler could not do better. He is truly talented and dedicated.
I saw Gamer and did not know what I was going to get. Big surprise! It reminded me of the first Matrix,an excellent movie, but I think it was better. People see the “action” factor of this film as its facade, but I see the plot as a thought provoking one because , although it is science fiction, it is not totally hard to believe that these things could at any moment take place. The movie delivered. Gerry, as always, delivered.

i went to see gamer again last night as i always see gerrys films twice, sometimes like with 300 to give it another go because the first time i didnt know what i was in for, a bit like gamer, and sometimes because its so good, i have to have another look. i was very surprised on the length of the film because i thought it was a two hour film and not an hour and a half. i still feel it should have been a bit longer, and shown more of what happened after he escaped, for example the humanz, his family and especially with castle. with 300, which by the way, was brilliant they had a more laid back approach to the story and it wasnt all fighting. in gamer, although the action was really good, especially the beginning, which i thought was the best bit in the film as you came straight into a video game and felt like you were right next to gerry deep in the explosions, fighting etc. it seemed it was all fighting and only a little bit of other stuff, if that makes sense. i did enjoy it slightly better second time around and it is a very thought out film and a brave new concept like 300, but it wont go to the top of my gerry film list, but it makes it more normal that im not going to love all of his films.

ive just been to see gamer and wow the action was fantastic but very in your face, because you feel as though you are right next to gerry playing the game. gerry worked really hard in this movie and had to put a lot into it, action wise. i was worried about the gruesome parts, but they were not as bad as i originally thought. im not sure if its my sort of film, but i wanted to see it as im a great gerry fan and enjoy his varied films, and i think it needs another look maybe in a few days time. its definitely yet again, a different sort of film, like 300 was, but not everyone will like all his films. i think the people who are mad on video games will enjoy it greatly as it is definitely up their street.

I roped three other friends into seeing it (two girls and a guy). I was the Gerry fan of the lot – the other three were just along for the ride. I was a tad dissapointed – I wanted a little more development in the story between Kable and Angie and the whole Ken Castel empire but hey, it worked for me, it contained Gerry. Afterward, one of the girls asked “So did you like it?” I responded that I did and she said “No, but did you like it because of Gerard (who they have affectionately dubbed my “baby daddy”) or did you like it because it was a good movie?” I just responded with “Seriously? Total Gerard factor you know that!!” Don’t get me wrong, I love a good action move and the violence is fine but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. As a previous poster said, can’t wait until “Law Abiding Citizen”. I think that will be more my speed.

I went to see Gerry, but I stayed for the awesome movie! Loud, violent, gratuitous EVERYthing, but as long as you know that’s the kind of movie you’re in for (I mean, come on. It’s not exactly P.S.I Love You), it’s fantastic. Kudos to everyone in it. Check out my review: genevieve-thewritemove.blogspot.com

Bottom line: I thought GAMER was GOOD!!! Generally, I don’t like this genre of film but I was on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. It was also a very coherent story, which I did not expect, and the entire cast gave a very good performance. Gamer is violent, hence the R rating. The film is a cross between the MATRIX, TERMINATOR AND SIN CITY. And for people (young and old) who enjoy playing video games, they would LOVE this movie! I think the real problem here is the lack of publicizing or selling the film to the public by the producers or LionsGate. To start, they should have really sold GAMER at ComicCon and then advertised it heavily leading up to its release Labor Day weekend. There was no premiere and even Gerry’s public appearances for the film were limited. I’m a huge fan of Gerry and I would see any film he makes, but as in the case of so many of his previous films, most of the U.S. has yet to discover him outside of 300. Picking the right film to do is a crap shoot for any actor and I know that Gerry doesn’t want to be typecast. It’s also true that every actor is at the mercy of the director, editor or film studio. In my opinion, THE UGLY TRUTH and ROCKNROLLA should have been big hits for Gerry. And like those films, if people just go see GAMER they would be pleasantly surprised. As a side note, my son just graduated from Harvard with a minor in Film Studies. When he was last home, I actually forced him to watch ROCKNROLLA and to his astonishment, he thought that Gerry’s performance and the film were really good. So for those of you who are fans of Gerry and saw GAMER spread the word. This film, like many of Gerry’s previous films, deserves a chance.

Love, love, LOVE Gerry but the movie was a bit disappointing. Someone already mentioned it was geared towards teenage boys (who like violent video games) and I think thats true. The movie could have gone into more depth on the relationship with the friend he murdered or with the “anti Castle society” etc. instead of focusing just on the violence….300 had lots of violence but the story line was deeper so it worked really well. Loved The Ugly Truth and looking forward to Law Abiding Citizen but Gamer didn’t live up to my expectations…

I adore Gerry and only saw the movie becuase as a huge fan, I feel I need to support all of his efforts. This movie, was however, geared towards a very small segment of the population. I think 14 year old boys might enjoy it, but that’s about it! Gerry is smart and funny as well as well as wonderful to look at. He does better in more intelligent roles. Looking forward to the release of Law Biding Citizen in October. Love you Gerry – keep safe and be happy.

I saw Gamer with my two younger brothers. I thought this was an excellent film with an original plot. Gerard Butler was great in it as always. The only negative to me was the nudity. Of course, my brothers loved the action.